By Victoria Webber, ACE Ambassador for Portland High School’s Environmental Club in Portland, Maine.

The Portland High School Environmental Club started in 1990. It has about twelve dedicated members now and have had a good year. This year we have done a day of hunger to raise money for Heifer International. We successfully raised $480. We also started a Clynk fundraiser. Clynk is an organization for which we collect redeemable cans and bottles to raise money. The bags we have for clynk are just on the floor in classrooms because we have nothing to put them in. Over the past few years we have looked into putting a green roof on our school and hope to get one next year. Our club is very interested in reducing wast and helping the environment.

ACE has come to Portland High School twice. They came once in 2009 and then again the next year in 2010. The presentation was all about reducing waste and our individual footprints. It was also about getting connected with other people.

After seeing this we really wanted to get more connected and change our school to be more environmentally friendly. The presentation did bring one or two more members to the club. I became the ACE Ambassador and started getting emails from ACE. I got an email about the leadership training at the Boston Science Museum which I thought sounded cool. We were not able to go to that one but we were ready to jump at the next opportunity.

When I got an email for the training in Cambridge we decided to go. Two of us went and were looking forward to meeting other environmental clubs. We also wanted some project ideas and help with getting some projects started. The training was fun and we were able to take a lot from it. We played some games to get to know each other and we learned new organization skills. It was very useful to hear what other clubs were doing.

At the training, we applied for the grant for recycling. We wanted to expand recycling in our school and it felt like an attainable goal. We are getting terracycle started up and creating a better system for the Clynk bags. The $200 grant has helped us purchase bins for our cafeteria and really make us take the extra step to get this project going. I am very excited about this project and it should greatly decrease the amount of waste in our cafeteria and throughout the school.